Ik’r’Us Inc (2010)

It’s 1955 and life carries on just as it always has in Dreamville Indiana. The Eldridge Costello giant automobile assembly lines throb on like a choir of basses from Hell, while the kids hang out with their cars on the dusty ball park. With Halloween fast approaching, the lady members of the Dreamville Grand Teepee of Buffaloes, the Buffalesses, are making the biggest pumpkin pie you’ve ever seen. It’s a county wide competition to find fun ways to feed the poor – and if anyone can rise to the challenge it’s Janet Brewster, the wife of Earl Brewster IV, the Supreme Chief of the Dreamville teepee and mayor of the town. But the nefarious and sinister factory owner, Eldridge L. Costello, with the help of local gangster Jimmy ‘Scarface’ Pescatori, has other ideas.

Then a stranger walks into town – just walks in as if he owned the place, with his pasty-faced dreamer of a son. Begins banging on doors with his suitcase by his side. Calling out his mantra like some god forsaken preacher. “Your dreams are just a place! We’ll take you there at Ik ‘r’ us Inc!” The kid hanging in the background. The local girls eyeing him up, just as if he were made of candy. “Flights of every kind! To the moon! To the stars! To your wildest dreams! Of fancy, of love, of hope, of ambition, of imagination, of passion, of stairs!” And sure enough, people come tumbling into the street, pouring out their goddamn hearts.

Our 2010 play told the story of Daedalus H. Gildersleeves, a travelling salesman who has progressed from selling vacuum cleaners to encyclopedias and finally to selling dreams. Rivalries are exposed, grievances and pain long-since veiled in repectability are revealed, and secret hopes laid bare as Daedalus begins to fly the Dreamville townsfolk up into the clear blue Indiana skies to their dreams.

The school swot, Sandra, and daughter of the mayor, finally looks up from her book, Bullfinch’s ‘Beauties of Mythology’, long enough to notice and fall in love with Daedalus’ pale faced visionary of a boy, Ikarus, and watches as his dream gets bigger and bigger until he is irrevocably drawn to the source of both life and death, the sun. Then Sandra notices on page 200 of her book a terrifying detail – and is thrown into panic and despair!

Hilarious, romantic, tender, searching – and laced with rock’n’roll – this was our first production where we also released a soundtrack CD ‘Don’t Chase Crows’ and we shot our ‘Introducing The Rudes’ promotional video from the final dress rehearsals for the production.